Video: Full house: Katrina family story

RICHMOND, Texas — When Mary Mays arrives home from her accounting job in Houston, she keeps counting. She has 44 guests in her five-bedroom house — four generations from the family tree and a few of their friends from New Orleans, too — all under one roof.

“How do we manage? Very carefully,” says Mays.

They share the cooking and eat in shifts. Each family has a laundry day. The washer and dryer never stop running.

There are at least 15 children in the house, enough to filed their own football team.

“How is the family doing? We're doing pretty good,” says Mary’s mom, 73-year-old Lucille Goodon, whose house in New Orleans is near the 17th Street Canal that broke.

Goodon talks about how the family rode out Hurricane Katrina at her home. But when the levees broke and the water rose, they escaped by boat and then piled into the back of a truck and drove 11 hours to Houston.

“I've always tried to get them people out of Louisiana,” says Mays, “but I didn't think it was gonna be all at one time.”